Liquid Emotion Music is the outgrowth of an educational concept combining the knowledge of the craft of creating music, with the power of performing, to create a transcendent experience for each student. The head of Liquid Emotion Music, Rachel Clark, contacted me to help her bring this vision that she had been cultivating for years to life.

Early on I had some vague ideas in my head about what this logo should look like but I wasn’t quite sure how to bring the various elements together. From talking with Rachel I knew the logo needed to be dynamic, convey movement and make good use of color to signify something that was alive. The idea behind the name was that music flows like water and can be transferred from one person’s emotions or soul into another. With such strong ideas it was going to be essential and challenging to convey this through the logo mark itself.

I started playing with liquid blob sketches. Even going so far as to spill water out on my desk to see how water droplets reacted with each other. The problem was that there wasn’t a whole lot that was visually alive about simple blobs. Some other sketches I did explored the various shapes of musical notes but I ran into the same problems. Nothing visually exciting, or in this case nothing that hadn’t been done with musical notes thousands of times before in Microsoft Word.

I then started to think about combining the two ideas. What if I accentuated the rounder parts of a musical note to make it more like a blob of liquid? Eventually the music note shape became more abstract, and more implied rather then a direct shape that screamed it was a musical note. I came up with the final logo mark in a simple black and white shape that gave a sense of a musical note, and the sense of something that was alive and in motion. I made the lower blob slightly bigger than the top one to give a sense that the top blob is in the process of transferring itself into the lower one. This accomplished one of the main goals for the logo of showing graphically what happens when someone gives of themselves through music.

I used purple and blue to further strengthen the idea of transference. As the blue transfers itself to the lower blob it goes through an area of tension and slowly becomes something else greater then itself. I decided on purple as the base color to convey feminism, spirituality and balance. The blue is calming, safe, appeals to both sexes and was a natural progression from purple in the natural color spectrum. To really bring in some life to this logo mark, I gave it highlights to imply a liquid form.